Christianity & Culture

Tag: Worship

Our church has recently been discussing life in the Spirit, focusing upon the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. We found that pursuing this subject led us to the way Paul portrays the corporate reality of life in the Spirit: “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.”[1] While we were doing this study, I read an article on weaving the Psalter into our corporate worship by James Jordan. Jordan gave me the uncomfortable sensation that I was ignoring plain inferences that I should be making from the quite descriptive Pauline passage quoted above.

Singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. When asked to describe what ‘walking in the Spirit’ objectively looks like, I never heard anyone from my small group answer with this description. I was curious about the distinction between psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Jordan replied:

We don’t need even to discuss what “hymns and spiritual songs” are, because we have not yet mastered the psalms. Once we know all 150 psalms, we can then decide what are appropriate hymns and spiritual songs.

The argument is that the evangelical church has slowly left off the historic practice of singing the Psalter in corporate and private worship. And Jordan isn’t referring to dynamic paraphrases of the Psalms put into song, but the actual texts of Scripture themselves:

Text psalms preserve the poetic parallelism of the Scripture, and thus accentuate the dialogical and antiphonal theology of the psalter. Moreover, metrical psalms must of necessity be “dynamically equivalent,” rephrasing ideas, omitting certain words, emphasizing others, substituting other names for God in order to make the rhyme come out, etc. Metrical psalms are like Biblical paraphrases – useful, but no substitute. Metrical psalms are one application of the psalter, but they are not a substitute for the psalter.

It’s an arresting article, but it doesn’t provide suggestions on where to learn more. I’m grateful that our church has a weekly practice of responsively reading portions of Scripture together in between singing and the sermon. Many of these readings come from the Psalms. However, it does seem that we could experience them more fully if we sang them together as well.

In order to give you an idea of what Jordan says we’re missing, and to demonstrate how seriously he takes this subject, allow me to quote one more segment:

[I]f we drift from the psalms – the war chants of the Prince of peace – we shall drift into an easy and lax piety. The inner warfare will be de-emphasized, and the warfare for the world will disappear. The focus of hymns tends to be on matters easier for us to talk about, such as suffering and happiness. How many hymns, etc., do you know of that ask God to judge the enemy? I can think of one, by Luther, and it is psalm-based. In the face of abortion, pornography, rape, drug addiction, Islam… nothing less than psalms will do. The fact of the matter is that the present generation of American Christians will either learn to sing psalms, or it will die.

I hope you have a chance to read the article. I’ll be discussing this with my brothers and sisters at church. If you have any experience or information about how churches would begin this sort of practice, please let me know.

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I am not one of those people who think that the intensity of authentic worship rises to the degree that we don’t understand the mystery of God. There are people who seem to want to correlate them: My worship is just so strong when I realize what I don’t know. I say: Well, there is a sense in which God is vastly beyond us because infinite is beyond finite. But our worship to glorify God must be based on what we have seen of God, what we know of God, what he has revealed of himself. If we are just worshiping a haze, God is not getting a lot of glory from the warm feelings that we are having in our hearts because of the ignorance of not being in our heads because of the haze over our lives.

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I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on the history and development of music in Western Civilization and Martin Luther surprisingly came up. In keeping with the changing commitments in his time, Luther seemed almost Socratic in his attitude about the powerful influence of music on our lives. Socrates, recognizing the extreme power of music, thought the poets should be banned from the state. Luther agrees about its power, but argues that music can be a resource for soul-enhancing change:

Greetings in Christ! I would certainly like to praise music with all my heart as the excellent gift of God which it is and to commend it to everyone. But I am so overwhelmed by the diversity and magnitude of its virtue and benefits that I can find neither the beginning nor end or method for my discourse… We can mention only one point (which experience confirms), namely, that next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. She is a mistress and governess of those human emotions- to pass over the animals- which as masters govern men or more often overwhelm them. No greater commendation than this can be found- at least not by us. For whether you wish to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate- and who could number all these masters of the human heart, namely the emotions, inclinations, and affections that impel men to evil or good? – what more effective means than music could you find? The Holy Ghost himself honours her as an instrument for his proper work when in his Holy Scriptures he asserts that through her his gifts were instilled in the prophets, namely, the inclination to all virtues, as can be seen in Elisha [II Kings 3.15]. On the other hand, she serves to cast out Satan, the instigator of all sins, as is shown in Saul, the king of Israel [I Sam 16.23]. Thus it was not without reason that the fathers and prophets wanted nothing else to be associated as closely with the Word of God as music. Therefore, we have so many hymns and Psalms where message and music join to move the listener’s soul, while in other living beings and [sounding] bodies music remains a language without words.

Many of us regularly listen to music with an almost religious fervor. I wonder how this music affects our emotions, and how we are using music as a tool to challenge and to elevate our minds? Another question comes to mind- if all music is a form of meditation- how much do you think singing should be incorporated into the rhythms of our lives- both communal and solitary?